Tagged: Raves

Perhaps you’ve visited this blog during the season. Perhaps while here, you also stumbled upon "The Baseball Collector", a blog written by a Scrabble-playing friend of mine, Zack Hample.

Well, Zack and I have both won awards given out by mlb.com for our blogs. Zack’s blog took third place overall, and his post of September 29th (where he bumped into me, snagged a few baseballs, a glove from a player, and played catch with another player) took the prize for "Best Post". My blog garnered "Best Comedic Blog".

Buzz Bissinger (Friday Night Lights) followed Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa around for a good portion of the 2003 season, and presents an in-depth look at a critical 3-game series against the Cubs during that August.

Each game’s critical moments are dissected and given a managerial review. Why would LaRussa keep his tiring pitcher in … why wouldn’t he pinch-hit in a certain situation? These type of decisions, literally hundreds in each game, show LaRussa to be an obsessive, extremely focused individual.

Bissinger is a very talented writer, and he is able to present the games in a colorful and exciting way. Occasionally, his prose gets a little too "cute" or "theatrical", but on the whole, he presents a side of the clubhouse and the team psyche rarely before seen in such detail.

Growing up a Yankee fan in the early 70s, Murcer was pretty much the only star on the roster, and so he was the one I rooted for the most. He had to try and replace a legend (Mickey Mantle), and of course, no one could do that. But Murcer played a solid center field, and was a consistent run-producer for those Ralph Houk-led teams.

I’ve been a follower of Will Carroll’s work on Baseball Prospectus for a while now, and got a great deal of knowledge out of his last book "Saving the Pitcher".

"The Juice" is an excellent introduction to the ever-expanding and rapidly-changing world of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). Mr. Carroll presents a brief history of how athletes (and their trainers) have been seeking versions of magic elixirs for centuries, and then details the physiological changes and risks (and potential benefits) associated with use of PEDs.

Those readers looking for a tell-all on Barry Bonds and Jose Canseco should look elsewhere. "The Juice" DOES devote a chapter to the BALCO investigation, but it is presented in terms of the legal pathways that are being pursued, and who is being targeted and why. Bonds DOES get mentioned, but the book thankfully does not to jump to conclusions.

The chapter that "made" the book for me detailed the use of HGH by a high school pitcher who was told by a scout that he wasn’t tall enough. The interviews of the kid and his parents was amazing and thought-provoking.